Doctor Who: Planet of Fire by Peter Grimwade, British Broadcasting Corporation Read Free Book Online Page A

arrived.
    A howl like an air raid siren came from Kamelion’s mouth as he felt the increased radiation. He began to smudge.
    ‘No!’ shouted Peri. ‘Please don’t disappear.’
    Kamelion struggled to hold on to a vestige of his own personality. ‘An enemy of the Doctor is near,’ he moaned.
    ‘He invades me.’
    ‘No, Kamelion! You’re the only one who can help me.’
    The girl’s panic gave Kamelion the energy for a further moment of resistance. ‘Leave the TARDIS at once. Find the Doctor...’ He pivoted over the console and removed a small jagged wafer of printed circuit. ‘Give him this. Warn him that the Master...’ His words became an indecipherable ululation.
    ‘The Master? Who is the Master?’ Seeing that Kamelion could help her no more, Peri turned to the controls and fumbled with the door lever. Behind her someone chuckled. She looked back over her shoulder and saw, in place of Kamelion, the evil man in the black suit.
    ‘My dear Peri,’ the robotic Time Lord smiled. ‘Do not be confused by my shifting appearance. The transfer has now stabilised. I am immutably the Master.’
    In his adjacent TARDIS the real Master gazed into the coherer glass and saw his own image, as in a mirror.
    ‘Excellent Kamelion. Now quickly. To my TARDIS.
    Release me.’
    Obediently his doppelgänger opened the doors of the Doctor’s time-machine and took hold again of Peri’s arm.
    ‘I’m waiting here for the Doctor!’ shouted Peri, kicking and struggling.
    ‘You will come with me,’ hissed her tormentor, tightening his grip till Peri screamed, ‘or you will remain in the TARDIS...’ he gave another chuckle... ‘dead!’
    As they emerged into the ruined building where the blue police box had materialised, Peri momentarily forgot all her fears and discomfort at the sight of the ship’s exterior. ‘That’s all I need,’ she groaned. ‘A flying closet!’
    Her captor was about to add some observations of his own on the Doctor’s substandard TARDIS, when the earth started to shake.
    ‘Now what?’ cried Peri.
    ‘Merely the death throes of this blighted planet,’
    observed the Kamelion-Master, as he dragged his victim across the creeping ground.
    ‘It’s now or never,’ thought Peri as she followed her leader for a few more deceptive paces, then, taking her cue from a further convulsion of the earth, sprung sideways.
    But the metal Master followed her every movement, tightening his grip on her arm until Peri begged for mercy.
    The large stone which fell from the wall onto the creature’s head missed the girl by inches. The Master’s surrogate toppled like a ninepin and Peri was away, pausing only to dodge around a yellow, fluted Corinthian column which the earthquake was rocking alarmingly.
    In the pitching laboratory, the Master struggled to steady his precious machine, but, as his TARDIS finally keeled over, both Time Lord and metamorphosis projector, with the whole paraphernalia of the workroom, tumbled like dice.
    Outside, a second column crashed onto the fallen TARDIS, and a third amidst a shower of loose stones. Pediment and entablature from the derelict colonnade thudded into the growing pile of masonry.
    The Master’s TARDIS was well and truly buried.
    The Master opened his eyes to find himself lying in the corner of his laboratory under a huge pile of equipment, his head aching vicariously from the blow to Kamelion. He got to his feet and looked round at the damage. The metamorphosis projector rested on its side in the centre of the wall which had now become the floor of the laboratory.
    The Master righted the machine, which was his lifeline with his slave. He breathed a sigh of relief for there was no sign of malfunction. A few adjustments to the controls and Kamelion appeared in the coherer glass in the image of the evil Time Lord. ‘Excellent,’ he whispered as he increased the power. ‘Come, my Kamelion, revive!’
    Kamelion clawed his way out of the mound of loose stones and mortar.